


Taste of Brine and Salt

by kittydesade



Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Carey
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-22
Updated: 2009-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Self-exiled to an island, Hyacinthe finds very little comfort or company in much of anything, except sometimes his dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taste of Brine and Salt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wil/gifts).



Her lips tasted of brine and the sea. I had no memory of her tasting of aught else.

It was hard, and I could have told her so, but I didn't. To simply say that it was hard would mean nothing; she knew the price of exile. She had spent years traveling in foreign lands, chasing down legends and dreams and with very few exceptions, she had found them. She had found everything that she had sought.

It gave me hope that she would find the key to my freedom, now that she knew where to look.

I spent most of my time studying in the tower, in my rooms or with the Master of the Straits in his workshop. The studies occupied so much of my time that I had little room to think about what was happening to me, what would happen, and for that I was grateful. No one wants to think about how they will eventually wither, and go on.

In the hours between the evening meal and sleep I did have time to think, and those were the worst. There were times when I would have rather escaped into the _dromonde_ than sleep, anyone's future, whatever I could see. It was no escape, of course; the only thing stretching out before me was years and decades of servitude to the winds and the water, a cause that I had never meant to take for my own until Phedre had tried to sacrifice herself. To be sure, I was always more willing to sacrifice myself than cause her suffering.

There was no escape in the _dromonde,_ backwards or forwards. There was the pain of what might have been, which was worse, but some nights warranted worse. Like a man in a stupor of drugs I returned, ever and again, to thoughts of what we might have become. King of Travellers and Queen of Courtesans.

"I could have been, you know."

In my dreams I was often sitting with her on the coast, where I could sometimes see her in the mirror basin. She would sit with her skirts folded over her knees and I would sprawl over the grass as I had done and we would talk of nothing at all, and everything in the world.

"I know," she said, and smiled.

She had a way of smiling about her, smiling with her whole being. It reduced everything to a minor inconvenience and made one feel as though they and she were the only two in the world. It had made me feel better, for a little while, our last night together. It was a beautiful smile.

There was a time when I had thought that she cultivated that as a tool for her patrons, and then apologized to her, if only in my thoughts.

"We would have been great. We could have traveled the world, and for a far nicer purpose than you travel now," I added. She had never traveled to see the world for its own sake, or to study or for her pleasure. It was always some grand quest or another, the fixing of someone else's problems. "You do too much fixing of other people's problems."

"One of those other people being you," she pointed out, laying her hand on my arm. "I do it because I choose to do it. You know that."

I did. She was a far more generous soul than I, and I told her so.

"I am as the gods have made me," she told me.

The bitterness in her voice reminded me of what she had mentioned, once. _Lypiphera_, the pain-bearer, and I thought that we were both suffering for the sake of thousands of others. She bore the pain and guilt so that countries might prosper and peoples might live, and I would bear the duties, the responsibilities of the Master of the Straits, who held coastlines in his hands.

It was not a responsibility I wanted any longer. "You are as you have chosen," I muttered, twisting and rolling the coin between my fingers. "As am I. We are products of grand dreams and too many disappointments."

"Oh, Hyas," she sighed, and leaned her cheek to my shoulder. In my dreams we had the luxury of long conversations, my imaginings of her the only comfort she could provide in my exile, save for her letters.

"And Joscelin is well?" Mayhap I was bitter, too, some days, that she chose the Cassiline over me. Perhaps there was some of Elua's bloodline in me but there was other as well, and I was not raised entirely to be graceful in love. I could not, however, argue with the happiness he brought her, and he was a good man.

Phedre nodded. "He is well. We are both grateful for this time of peace even at so bloody a cost." Ten years of peace, she wrote, that she had been guaranteed in return for ten men's lives. Perhaps it was an even trade; in my exile my view of the bargains of gods with men has soured.

"A warrior grateful for peace. Now there's a wonder." But I said it ironically. She knew what I meant.

"No one regards peace so highly as one who knows the cost of conflict," she murmured anyway, for both of us contemplating it. I appreciated the care with which she chose her words. I was no warrior, not like Joscelin, but I still carried the weight and paid the cost of the conflict between an angel and a mortal woman who loved another. Thinking on it that way, I looked at Phedre. She looked back at me with a question in her eyes.

I asked as best I could. "Is this all that we come to? All that drives us, the questions of love or the lack of it, who possesses it and whether or not they can catch hold or keep the object of it. Who is capable of it, who is not. Who..."

"... can be free of it?" She looked at me. We both thought of Moiread. "We are of Elua's line, love. For us, perhaps it is."

Elua's line. The blood of angels, so they said, and the _dromonde_ said it as well. Those who lived with such energy and ferocity and passion that they were markedly different from others, those in whom the blood ran strongest. Too close to the greater powers for living in peace and comfort.

Phedre put her hand on my arm, knowing where my thoughts were tending by the way my face shifted and moved. She was able to know my thoughts and how they shifted, always, how my moods could change in a moment. She was the only one.

Now she was gone, of course. Or I was gone, removed to where she could not stay and exiled to an island with only my half-formed dreams of her sleeping or waking to keep me company, that and a few words on parchment. Her communications came in spurts and sometimes entire months would go by without a single letter. Mayhap at those times she was traveling out of range of a courier. Mayhap it was during the Master's sullen fits; I only received letters from her at his sufferance to bring the letters' casings to shore.

The few I did receive, at least, were enough to keep her vivid in my mind. Enough for me to close my eyes and picture her in that mirror basin, sitting on the coast like some maiden in a fairy tale or a ballad or a dream, waiting for her lost love. And if I was not her chosen consort, we did love each other.

She was not one to wait idly by on some coastal cliff, though, not Phedre. She was crossing countries with determination and the taste of tears on her mouth searching for a solution, bargaining with coin I had no way of knowing the nature of. I wondered if she would ever tell me the price, and if I would reckon my freedom worth the cost. Every year, I thought I would let her pay a little more, even if I carried the guilt for it.

In this ballad I would be the one to wait for her at the edge of a high place, on the top of my tower, with the wind and the gulls and the spray of the sea. I would wait, because I knew she would come staggering along on the deck of some ship with her finery in tatters and her head held stubbornly high. I could wait, and content myself only with dreams of her companionship.

But it was very hard.


End file.
